about 10,000,000 gallons. Nearly one third of this is made in South California, chiefly in Los Angeles County, where the grape culture is steadily on the increase, five millions of new vines having been set out in the spring of 1882.
The vineyards offer more variety to the eye than the orange orchards. In winter, when leafless, they are grotesque; their stocky, twisted, hunchback stems looking like Hindoo idols or deformed imps, no two alike in a square mile, all weird, fantastic, uncanny. Their first leafing out does not do away with this; the imps seem simply to have put up green umbrellas; but presently the leaves widen and lap, hiding the uncouth trunks, and spreading over all the vineyard a beautiful, tender green, with lights and shades breaking exquisitely in the hollows and curves of the great leaves. From this on, through all the stages of blossoms and seed-setting, till the clusters are so big and purple that they gleam out everywhere between the leaves,—sometimes forty-five pounds on a single vine, if the vine is irrigated, twelve if it is left to itself. Eight tons of grapes off one acre have been taken in the Baldwin ranch. There were made there, in 1881, 100,000 gallons of wine and 50,000 of brandy. The vintage begins late in August, and lasts many weeks, some varieties of grapes ripening later than others. The vineyards are thronged with Mexican and Indian pickers. The Indians come in bands, and pitch their tents just outside the vineyard. They are good workers. The wine-cellars and the great crushing-vats tell the vineyards' story more emphatically even than the statistical figures. A vat that will hold 1,000 gallons piled full of grapes, huge wire wheels driving round and round in the spurting, foaming mass, the juice flying off through trough-like shoots on each side into seventy great vats; below, breathless men working the wheels, loads of grapes coming up momently and being poured into the swirling vat, the whole air reeking with winy flavor. The scene makes earth seem young again, old mythologies real; and one would not wonder to see Bacchus and his leopards come bowling up, with shouting Pan behind.
The cellars are still, dark, and fragrant. Forty-eight great oval-shaped butts, ten feet in diameter, holding 2,100 gallons each, I counted in one cellar. The butts are made of Michigan oak, and have a fine yellow color, which contrasts well with the red stream of the wine when it is drawn.
Notwithstanding the increase of the grape culture, the price of grapes is advancing, some estimates making it forty per cent higher than it was five years ago. It is a quicker and probably a more repaying industry than orange-growing. It is reckoned that a vineyard in its fourth year will produce two tons to the acre; in the seventh year, four; the fourth year it will be profitable, reckoning the cost of the vineyard at sixty dollars an acre, exclusive of the first cost of the land. The annual expense of cultivation, picking, and handling is about twenty-five dollars. The rapid increase of this culture has been marvellous. In 1848 there were only 200,000 vines in all California; in 1862 there were 9,500,000; in 1881, 64,000,000, of which at least 34,000,000 are in full bearing.
Such facts and figures are distressing to the advocates of total abstinence; but they may take heart in the thought that a by no means insignificant proportion of these grapes will be made into raisins, canned, or eaten fresh.
The raisin crop was estimated at 160,000 boxes for 1881. Many grape-growers believe that in raisin-making will ultimately be found the greatest profit. The Americans are a raisin-eating people. From Malaga alone are imported annually into the United States about ten tons of raisins, one half the entire crop of the Malaga raisin district. This district has an area of only about four hundred square miles. In California an area of at least twenty thousand square miles is adapted to the raisin.
A moderate estimate of the entire annual grape crop of California is 119,000 tons. "Allowing 60,000 tons to be used in making wines, 2,000 tons to be sent fresh to the Eastern States, and 5,000 tons to be made into raisins, there would still remain 52,000 tons to be eaten fresh or wasted,—more than one hundred pounds for each resident of California, including children."[1]
The California wines are as yet of inferior quality. A variety of still wines and three champagnes are made; but even the best are looked on with distrust and disfavor by connoisseurs, and until they greatly improve they will not command a ready market in America. At present it is to be feared that a large proportion of them are sold under foreign labels.
Prominent among the minor industries is honey-making. From the great variety of flowers and their spicy flavor, especially from the aromatic sages, the honey is said to have a unique and delicious taste, resembling that of the famous honey of Hymettus.
The crop for 1881, in the four southern counties, was estimated at three millions of pounds; a statistic that must seem surprising to General Fremont, who, in his report to Congress of explorations on the Pacific coast in 1844, stated that the honey-bee could not exist west of the Sierra Nevadas.
The bee ranches are always picturesque; they are usually in cañons or on wooded foot-hills, and their villages of tiny bright-colored hives look like gay Lilliputian encampments. It has appeared to me that men becoming guardians of bees acquire a peculiar calm philosophy, and are superior to other farmers and outdoor workers. It would not seem unnatural that the profound respect they are forced to entertain for insects so small and so wholly at their mercy should give them enlarged standards in many things; above all, should breed in them a fine and just humility toward all creatures.
A striking instance of this is to be seen in one of the most beautiful cañons of the San Gabriel valley, where, living in a three-roomed, redwood log cabin, with a vine-covered booth in front, is an old man kings might envy.
He had a soldier's warranty deed for one hundred and sixty acres of land, and he elected to take his estate at the head of a brook-swept gorge, four fifths precipice and rock. In the two miles between his cabin and the mouth of the gorge, the trail and the brook change sides sixteen times. When the brook is at its best, the trail goes under altogether, and there is no getting up or down the cañon. Here, with a village of bees for companions, the old man has lived for a dozen years. While the bees are off at work, he sits at home and weaves, out of the gnarled stems and roots of manzanita and laurels, curious baskets, chairs, and brackets, for which he finds ready market in Los Angeles. He knows every tree and shrub in the cañon, and has a fancy for collecting specimens of all the native woods of the region. These he shapes into paper-cutters, and polishes them till they are like satin. He came from Ohio forty years ago, and has lived in a score of States. The only spot he likes as well as this gorge is Don Yana, on the Rio Grande River, in Mexico. Sometimes he hankers to go there and sit under the shadow of big oaks, where the land slopes down to the river; but "the bee business," he says, "is a good business only for a man who has the gift of continuance;" and "it's no use to try to put bees with farms: farms want valleys, bees want mountains."
"There are great back-draws to the bee business, the irregularities of the flowers being chief; some years there's no honey in the flowers at all. Some explain it on one hypothesis and some on another, and it lasts them to quarrel over."
His phrases astonish you; also the quiet courtesy of his manner, so at odds with his backwoodsman's garb. But presently you learn that he began life as a lawyer, has been a judge in his time; and when, to show his assortment of paper-cutters, he lifts down the big book they are kept in, and you see that it is Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary," you understand how his speech has been fashioned. He keeps a diary of every hive, the genealogy of every swarm.
"No matter what they do,—the least thing,—we note it right down in the book. That's the only way to learn bees," he says.
On the outside wall of the cabin is fastened an observation hive, with glass sides. Here he sits, watch in hand, observing and noting; he times the bees, in and out, and in each one of their operations. He watches the queen on her bridal tour in the air; once the drone bridegroom fell dead on his note-book. "I declare I couldn't help feeling sort of sorry for him," said the old man.
In a shanty behind the house is the great honey-strainer, a marvellous invention,
